Machine Check Architecture

In computing, Machine Check Architecture (MCA) is an Intel and AMD mechanism in which the CPU reports hardware errors to the operating system.

Intel's P6 and Pentium 4 family processors, AMD's K7 and K8 family processors, as well as the Itanium architecture implement a machine check architecture that provides a mechanism for detecting and reporting hardware (machine) errors, such as: system bus errors, ECC errors, parity errors, cache errors, and translation lookaside buffer errors. It consists of a set of model-specific registers (MSRs) that are used to set up machine checking and additional banks of MSRs used for recording errors that are detected.